In the technology industry, it’s often a game of monkey see, monkey do. By that, I mean that when one company lands on a hit product, competitors soon follow with eerily similar offerings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as patents aren’t infringed upon. In fact, it typically…

Siri, the velvet-voiced iOS assistant that can give you directions, beatbox, do math and chat with you about Game of Thrones, is usually associated with Apple. But Siri was not originally made by Apple; it was launched in 2007 by Stanford Research Institute as a spin-off company, led by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber, and was sold to Apple in 2010.

Six years later, Cheyer and Kittlaus are back with a new product called Viv which, according to the Washington Post, will be publicly demonstrated at an industry conference Monday.

We’ve known for a while that Facebook is working on a special virtual assistant project that will be integrated into its popular Messenger chat application, and the service was finally launched on Wednesday. Dubbed “M,” the Messenger virtual assistant isn’t exactly a standalone service like Siri or Google Now. The whole thing works inside the Messenger app and the big difference is that the assistant combines both human and AI input to get you what you want. Here’s what it’ll look like. DON’T MISS: iPhone 6s Plus vs. Galaxy Note 5: Real world performance test (it’s not even close) Captured by Buzzfeed, the following screenshots show you various conversations between M, “your free personal assistant,” and users. From the looks

Using headphones with a mic makes your mobe slightly hackable, in theory

A group of researchers from the French government’s Network and Information Security Agency (ANSSI) have found a way to silently and wirelessly inject voice commands into unlocked iPhones and Android gadgets.…